On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 8:52 PM, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: I don't know and can not find where it was decided to include upload in auto-confirmed, but I do remember complaining about it previously when the criteria for auto-confirmed status was extended. Search for 'upload': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Autoconfirmed_Proposal/Poll2 At the time new users got a completely unhelpful permission denied response from the software, at least now you get a wall of text which somewhere has a link to commons. The benefit that some people tried to convince me of is that this policy effectively restricts the addition of images which are not freely licensed to established users. I'm not convinced that this is especially beneficial, and I suspect the added complexity of uploading to commons probably costs us contributions enough to offset whatever benefit the current behaviour brings. I'd rather see a more nuanced quarantine and approval process to deal with the low quality of submissions by new users. .. or, at least make the upload button go straight to commons for users who can't use it locally to cut out the extra chances for confusion. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

Making the upload button go straight to Commons would create a lot of problems there, as nonfree content that would be legitimate on Wikipedia would be routed there and subsequently deleted, creating headaches for them and confusion for the uploader.

I think an approval process might work, though there's certainly nothing stopping anyone from saying "There's an image at [link here] that I believe could legitimately be used in [[article]], could you please have a look and upload it if you agree?"